The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
I clicked the gate shut and slipped down the alley. Through one fence after another, I caught glimpses of people in their dining rooms and living rooms, eating and watching tv dramas. Food smells drifted into the alley through kitchen windows and extractor fans. One teenage boy was practising a fast passage on his electric guitar, with the volume turned down. In a second-floor window, a tiny girl was studying at her desk, an earnest expression on her face. A married couple having a heated argument sent their voices out into the alley. A baby was screaming. A telephone rang. Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl – as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response.
And then:
- Television The television was showing the same American series we ourselves were watching in the Schweinfurth’s living room, such that, as...
- JPod The next day the big drama was that John cast a spell on Evil Mark after Evil Mark ate a...
- The Comfort of Things Looking around at the ornaments, it is only too easy for people from another background and a different system of...
- Desolation Angels Because whether you murder or not, that’s the trouble, it makes no difference in the maddening void which doesn’t care...
- South of the Border, West of the Sun “Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west,...
- Born Yesterday I tell him I’m waiting for my dog who has found some interesting smells a little way back, to find...